No More Stolen Elections!

Unite for Voting Rights and Democratic Elections

News

Sometimes the movement calls people to action in ways that threaten their very existence - they know that a lack of action, no matter how dangerous, leads to the acceptance of destruction in the very near future.

To Cathy Wallace, the earthquakes that have been rattling her tidy suburban home in Dallas feel like underground thunderstorms. First comes a distant roar, then a boom and a jolt. Her house shakes and the windows shudder. Framed prints on the walls clatter and tilt. A heavy glass vase tips over with a crash.

﻿ On Wednesday, a group of kids and teenagers will face off in an Oregon courtroom against the US government and the fossil fuel industry. The young people, from states as far away as Florida, Arizona, New York, Hawaii, and Alaska, are suing President Obama and several federal agencies for inaction on climate change.

Bangladeshi villagers staged further protests on Tuesday after police opened fire and killed at least four people demonstrating against the planned construction of two large Chinese-financed coal-fired power stations.

On 22 March 2016, Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe (pictured), chairperson of the, Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) was assassinated at his home by two assailants who shot him eight times in the head. ACC, a South African community organisation has been subjected to sustained harassment from local authorities and a mining company, for its campaign to oppose titanium mining on the ancestral land of local communities in the pristine Eastern Cape Province. Prior to the assassination, Rhadebe had contacted other members of the organisation warning them of a hit list that his name was on.

Since her mother’s murder a month ago, Bertha Isabel Zuniga Cáceres has scarcely had time to grieve. The 25-year-old student is adamant that her mother, Berta Cáceres Flores, will not become just one more Honduran environmental activist whose work was cut short by their assassination.

Nearly 400 people from across the state of New York and beyond rallied in Albany today asking Gov. Cuomo to stand up to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and use the state’s authority under the Clean Water Act to deny the 401 water quality certificate for the Constitution Pipeline.

Opponents of Phillips 66’s proposed rail spur came from across California Thursday to protest the project as it appeared before the San Luis Obispo County Planing Commission. An estimated total of more than 500 people showed up to the first day of a two-day hearing on the planned rail spur.

After months of protest and tension in Minneapolis, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that he will not charge officers Dustin Schwarze and Mark Ringgenberg for the killing of Jamar Clark, an unarmed man who died from a gunshot to the head. Freeman says Schwarze shot Clark within 61 seconds of his arrival at the scene of a domestic dispute. According to the county attorney, Clarke was resisting arrest and had his hand on Ringgenberg’s gun.

The Minneapolis City Council on Friday approved an ordinance that will ban carry-out plastic bags for most retailers and add a 5 cent litter fee.

Starting June 1, 2017, customers of Minneapolis retailers will have to use paper bags instead of plastic bags. The ordinance excludes plastic bags used for dry cleaning, newspaper deliveries, and plastic bags for takeout food or that come in direct contact with food (like ones used for fresh produce).

Minneapolis-St. Paul janitors have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract following months of negotiations and a 24-hour strike last month.

The union representing about 4,000 janitors across the Twin Cities announced that an agreement on a new four-year contract was reached between janitors and their employers after a 12-hour bargaining session that ended early Monday morning.

August, the Birmingham, Ala. local government took a significant step toward supporting low-wage workers in the city by raising minimum wage to more than $10 from the national floor of $7.25. The move constituted a strong victory for labor rights and community activists, who had spent months rallying support and talking to lawmakers in an effort to make Birmingham the first city in the South to raise its minimum wage. By August, the decision had garnered a broad base of support that included workers, activists, city officials and a large segment of residents.

Last week, a bill to pre-empt states’ rights to label GMOs was overturned in the Senate. With over 90% of Americans in favor of labeling foods containing Genetically Modified ingredients, this outcome lends hope at a time in which many of us might feel the weight of corporate interest too often impacting legislation.

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox (Gasland) and others from the activist group Beyond Extreme Energy were arrested today protesting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for its role in continuing to permit fossil fuel projects that will greatly accelerate climate change.

Kraft Mac & Cheese hit the news earlier this month with a series of marketing videos announcing many of their most popular products were free from artificial dyes. Such a substantial recipe change may seem like a sudden pivot, but it’s old news to the 365,806 consumers who spent three years promoting a petition on Change.org targeting Kraft for the removal of all synthetic dyes in Mac & Cheese.

Montana communities won a victory against one of the world’s biggest coal companies earlier this month, when Arch Coal abandoned the Otter Creek mine – the largest proposed new coal strip mine in North America. The story of how the project imploded is one of people power triumphing over a company once thought to be nearly invincible.

Faith Decker, a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University, got off work a little early Tuesday night so she could vote in her first-ever primary. She arrived at a church in southeast Phoenix just before 7 p.m. to find "the line wrapped completely around the corner, 300 to 400 people." After waiting in that line for more than three hours, she finally reached the check-in desk. She was told that she couldn't vote—not because the polls had closed three hours before, but because she was registered in a different county.

The TPP threatens laws and regulation designed to protect public health, financial transparency, food safety, workers rights, the climate and the environment. It allows governments to be sued by corporations for lost profit as a result of these ordinances. Yet labor, environmental, health care, internet/free press, climate justice, green energy and democracy organizations were excluded from negotiations, and, under fast track, can't work with legislators to amend the text of the agreement.

Global corporations are engaged in a series of elaborately planned moves to take away our democratic rights, and currently, nowhere is that more evident than in the promotion of multinational trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Alliance for Democracy’s TPP-Free Zone campaign encourages communities to organize proactively against the TPP. This campaign also provides a basis for establishing strong local rights as part of a global movement for economic and environmental justice.

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NMSE is part of a network of organizations that support the Democratic Revolution.

We follow in the footsteps of earlier voting rights struggles. We draw inspiration from the suffrage and civil rights movements of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the experience from the Democracy Summer coalition of 2001, and the No Stolen Elections! campaign of 2004, and No More Stolen Elections! campaigns of 2008 and 2011.